Monitoring Azure Virtual Machines with Azure Monitor

Maintaining the health and performance of your cloud infrastructure requires clear visibility into how your virtual machines are running. Without proper monitoring, identifying bottlenecks, system failures, or resource constraints becomes a guessing game. This text-based course guides you from the absolute basics of cloud observability to setting up a robust monitoring strategy for Azure Virtual Machines. You will learn how to configure data collection, write queries to analyze system logs, and set up automated alerts to resolve issues before they impact your users. What you'll learn: • Understand the core concepts of cloud monitoring, including metrics, logs, and basic observability terminology. • Configure the modern Azure Monitor Agent and Data Collection Rules to gather guest-level performance data. • Query and analyze system logs using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to troubleshoot virtual machine issues. • Set up metric and log alerts to automatically notify your team when performance thresholds are crossed. • Create custom dashboards within Azure to visualize virtual machine health and resource utilization. The course starts with foundational definitions of cloud telemetry before moving step-by-step through agent installation, data collection setup, log analysis, and alert configuration. You will practice through written scenarios and step-by-step configuration walkthroughs. This course is designed for beginner cloud administrators, systems engineers, and IT professionals who are new to Azure infrastructure monitoring. No prior monitoring experience is required, though a basic familiarity with running virtual machines is helpful. Start reading today to build a reliable, observable virtual machine environment in Azure.